Campbell had said that “there are so few books for queer black boys, but there are just too few books for all our marginalised young people”. Rosoff, author of How I Live Now and other bestselling titles, responded that “there are not too few books for marginalised young people. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them”, and that “you don’t have to read about a queer black boy to read a book about a marginalised child”.

“The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented,” wrote Rosoff. “You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice in Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.”

On the commute to work I couldn’t stop thinking about this notion that advocates of diversity are being “too literal,” and that what we expect is “a mirror” in literature that maps one-to-one against our own personal life experiences. I kept thinking about how, elsewhere in the Guardian piece, the Ms. Rosoff is quoted as saying (in response to social media pushback:

I really hate this idea that we need agendas in books. A great book has a philosophical, spiritual, intellectual agenda that speaks to many many people – not just gay black boys. I’m sorry, but write a pamphlet about it. That’s not what books are for.

This framing of increasingly-diverse participation in the world of literature and public speech as agenda-driven and somehow antithetical to “Good literature [that] expands your mind” is a tired, reactionary position. And it tells us far more about the speaker than it does about the individuals who are busily creating an ever-more-diverse literature that fully represents our human experience is all of its’ myriad universal-yet-specific particulars. Continue reading →

I had an appointment at your radiology department this afternoon to follow up on a potential irregularity in my left breast (thankfully all is well!). Overall I had an exceptional experience: your reception staff, mammography and ultrasound technicians, and doctor were all courteous and professional. The decor was a little overwhelmingly floral, and was it really necessary to have that much pink in the color scheme — right down to the pink floral sticker they affixed to the relevant spot on my boob? But I can roll my eyes at those design decisions and get on with my day.

What I am uninterested in rolling my eyes at and moving on from is this:

Several years ago, when my wife had an appointment in your radiology department we happened to notice this sign in passing and found it troubling. I had hoped, upon my return today, to find that your policies and signage had changed — but had my phone ready to hand for snapping this picture if they had not. And here we are.

My problem with this sign and policy is quite simple: Male people (assigned and/or identified) can get breast cancer or experience other physical issues needing breast imaging services. Whether or not you provide those services to male individuals elsewhere, or make exceptions to the stated policy on a case-by-case basis, the sign is alienating. It is unwelcoming not just to men but to women (like me and my wife) who find spaces that are women-only by policy to be unwelcoming, uncomfortable spaces. To put it another way, I am more comfortable accessing healthcare in a place welcome to people of all combinations of sex, gender, and sexuality than I am seeking care in a place that explicitly states that it only welcomes certain types of bodies and/or identities to pass through its doors.

Given that our family’s health center, Fenway Health — a leading provider of respectful, holistic care to trans and genderqueer individuals — refers patients regularly to your institution for necessary clinical care, I would have expected better from you. I am disappointed that in 2015 you continue to use signage (and presumably enforce policies) that are so exclusionary.

I hope the next time I have reason to visit your radiology department I won’t have cause to pull my camera out of my messenger bag.

Since Windsor, and the death of DOMA, the marriage equality struggle here in the U.S. hasn’t had a lot of direct bearing on our family life. Hanna and I are married in the eyes of the state of Massachusetts and our federal government. It is only when traveling to non-equality states (such as my home state of Michigan) — or when we consider distant possibilities of future relocation — that it really hits home for us that our marriage is still legally more fragile than the marriages of our hetero married friends.

So I admit I’ve been watching the journey of same-sex marriage cases through the state and federal circuit courts attentively but not too closely. I’ve been interested, but with little feeling of personal urgency at this juncture, to see how it all plays out.

But today watching the live-blog of oral arguments and later reading the transcript of the same, it was undeniably energizing to see decades of agitation and strategy (yes, on both sides) demonstrably playing out in the wandering, back-and-forth debate that is an oral argument before the Supreme Court.

There’s already been a bajillion and one pieces of commentary published already, and I’m not going to try and be originally wise on any aspect of this case. Yet reading through the transcript, I was struck by two things I wanted to share. Continue reading →

I don’t know how many calories were in this breakfast.
For me, that is a sign of better health than when I did.
As always, your mileage may vary.

I woke up this morning to a story on NPR about new FDA rules that will require restaurants with more than twenty locations to provide “calorie information” on their menus. Unsurprisingly, the story was factual-to-positive about the change; National Public Radio has a history of uncritically reproducing narratives about fatness, health, and the supposed “obesity epidemic” around which much moral panic has been generated in recent years. Public health workers gushed about the “terrific” new labeling and we were treated to clips of (young, female) customers giggling self-deprecatingly about their food choices and how calorie counts might encourage them to change their orders — always to something with fewer calories.

Given NPR’s glowing coverage, I feel the need to intervene in this self-congratulatory narrative and share a few thoughts on what effect providing calorie counts on menus has on me, as a consumer, and why I believe the practice is neutral at best and actively harmful at worst.

Why are we, as a society, obsessed with calories? A dietary calorie is a way of measuring energy, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the heat of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Humans require fuel (measured in calories) to function; we consume energy in order to expend energy through physical movement, cognitive thought, to keep ourselves warm, to keep ourselves alive.

Fuel comes in many delicious forms, some more efficient than others; we can consume relatively “empty” fuel that is a poor source of energy, or energy-rich foods that supply us with nutrients we need to grow, repair, and function.

Therefore, to learn that the sandwich I ate for lunch on Monday contained 500 calories worth of fuel provides strikingly little information with which to guide my dietary selections. That sandwich could contain just what I need to help me function for the rest of the day; it could be superfluous energy that nevertheless served a social or emotional function; it could be fuel that actively worked against me in terms of an allergy or other physical reaction. The calorie count provides none of that information. Displayed by itself, alongside a series of menu options, the calorie units of each option is a set of supremely useless data.

But I would go further than that. I would argue that displaying calorie counts alongside menu options is actively harmful when considered in the context of our social dysfunction around food and our culture of fatphobia. Because in the public mind calories aren’t just a neutral way of measuring energy; calories are bad. Calories are shameful. And I’m betting that the 30% of consumers who, NPR reports, will actually read those calorie counts on the Starbucks menu are individuals who are already hyper-aware of their energy intake, who are already struggling with a disordered relationship with their bodies.

I’m betting this because, as I’ve described before, I used to be one of those people. One of those women. Between the ages of roughly sixteen and twenty-four I tracked my energy intake by counting calories. I still own cookbooks in which I once penciled in the calories for things like three cloves of garlic (24) and a tablespoon of lemon juice (10).

Yes, I learned a lot of nutritional information during this period, learned how to seek out a wide variety of foods to fuel my body, learned to pay attention to my body’s energy ups and downs.

But mostly, my sense of self of self worth rose and fell with the end-of-the-day tally of calories. (And to a lesser extent quantified exercise.) It didn’t matter what else I’d accomplished that day: acts of kindness toward others, ideas articulated in writing, conversations, explorations, creations.

It all came down to the numbers:

1540 (victory).

1860 (shame).

2300 (guaranteed to send me to bed weeping).

To this day, seeing calorie counts listed beside my fuel options prompts stress reactions, visceral reminders of a time when what counted about my personhood was how much fuel I did (or didn’t) consume.

A time when less fuel equaled more worth.

So forgive me, NPR, if I don’t view these new FDA regulations as an unalloyed good. As an act of self care, I’ll likely be avoiding — as much as possible — those restaurants affected by the new rules. Because rather than a tool for making informed fueling decisions, I see calorie counts as mostly promoting a simplistic less-is-better, fatphobic and deeply disordered, alienated relationship to our bodies and the way we care for them.

I found Sarah Schulman’s Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (New Press/Perseus, 2009) reading The Tolerance Trap and requested it inter-library loan thinking it was going to be a study of the ravages of anti-gay animus within families. Instead, it is more of a philosophical-political reflection on the practices within families (and by extension within the wider culture) that create we queer people as a lesser group. Schulman draws powerfully on work done by feminist activists around domestic violence and the workings of other types of prejudice such as antisemitism to describe how queer family members are isolated and scapegoated within families — and how the social systems these families are a part of support that violence through passive bystander behaviors. She illustrates a lot of her observations with stories about her own family’s unwillingness to maintain positive connections with her because of her lesbian identity: parents who say in front of her that she was born “bad’; siblings who refuse to allow her contact with her their children.

Reading Ties That Bind was personally disorienting as an experience; I kept checking the publication date — really? 2009? — because so much of what she was describing felt like the climate of the 1970s and 80s rather than the early 2000s. Which is definitely a good reminder that our experience, as queer individuals, of homobigotry is far from uniform, and that our treatment at the hands of friends and family shapes how we interpret and react to the structural and more distant social inequalities that continue to color all of our lives. Because of my family’s support, and because of the social norms of my immediate community (expecting nondiscrimination), when I do encounter erasure or hostility I experience it as a departure from, rather than a reinforcement of, the morality of my people. That is, not only do I believe that there’s no reason to fear my sexuality would harm children, but all of my friends and family members would look at someone like they were right bastards for suggesting such a thing.

That kind of support, in turn, leads to resilience for those of us who have it: with our many-layered communities behind is, we aren’t isolated in the face of structural discrimination or individual acts of bigotry. For those whose families do disown them, as Schulman points out, the recourse is the much more difficult and contingent road of creating your own support system from scratch, always with the voices in the back of your head — the parental authorities of your childhood — telling you how worthless, how lesser-than, you are. Continue reading →

It’s been roughly five years since Hanna and I started snogging one another.

And, well, other things. It all happened in a bit of a rush; I never was a very patient person once I’d finally determined it was time to do something new. And for us, apparently, the time for sexytimes was late June 2009.

Being ‘brought out’ has within it that dual sense of sexuality and community. One is ‘brought out’ by another queer person and simultaneously brought into the queer community … coming out in these earlier and sometimes explicitly political iterations was understood as both a process personal and social, both confessional and performative, narrating a ‘shared fate’ but also an ‘imagined community .'(70)

This got me thinking about my own experience of coming out / being brought out into self-awareness and visible queer sexuality. My attitudes toward coming out as a helpful narrative (for myself; for others) have fluctuated a lot over the years. On the one hand, I definitely experienced the silencing pressure of presumptive heterosexuality, experienced the feeling of being closeted. People assumed I was straight and I mostly didn’t correct them.

The American Prospect has a most excellent article up today, The Homeschool Apostates, by Kathryn Joyce, exploring the growing visibility of young adults who are organizing and pushing back against their parents’ decision to use home education as a tool for familial control:

Even conservative Patrick Henry felt like a bright new reality. While much about the college confirmed the worldview Lauren grew up in, small freedoms like going out for an unplanned coffee came as a revelation. She describes it as “a sudden sense of being able to say yes to things, when your entire life is no.”

Family ties began to fray after she met John, a fellow student who’d had a more positive homeschooling experience growing up; he took her swing dancing and taught her how to order at Starbucks, and they fell in love. Her parents tried to break the couple up—at one point even asking the college to expel Lauren or take away her scholarship for disobeying them. Their efforts backfired; soon after her graduation, Lauren married John and entered law school.

As someone who grew up within the early unschooling wave of the modern home education movement, and thrived within it, I often find myself frustrated by most media coverage of homeschooling — it is too often simplistic, judgmental, one part awe (such well-behaved children!) one part hysteria (equating home education, per se, with child abuse). In contrast, Joyce does an excellent job of covering a specific type of homeschooling, as well as teasing out the highly gendered nature of Christian homeschooling culture. She also foregrounds the thoughtful, passionate voices of home-educated young people who look back on their childhoods and the Christian subculture they were immersed in with a critical eye.

While I don’t agree with everything these ex-homeschoolers have to say, I think their voices are crucial ones for us to listen to — particularly those of us who have benefited from the low level of state oversight that enabled our families to do our own thing while these controlling parents to did theirs. I don’t always agree with the remedies these ex-homeschoolers propose, but I do believe their experiences must be taken seriously. We can’t in good faith build a culture of learner-led education on the backs of young people who have been denied a very basic level of self-determination and autonomy.

I realize writing commentary about a New York Times ladypiece is picking low-hanging fruit, but I have a sinus headache and it’s too early to go to bed, so here we are.

If you missed it, Time magazine ran a story last week about people women who choose not to parent and the apparently glamorous, self-centered, satisfying lives we lead. As Tracie Egan Morrissey wryly pointed out at Jezebel, the write-up was framed in such a way as to ensure that even non-parenting women are wrapped into the narrative of the “batshit mommy war”:

Perhaps you thought that not having children left you untethered. Wrong! Time has roped you into it, with some inflammatory quotes that will get all the mothers in the world to hiss at you brazen hussies and your childfree existences.

Most of us non-parenting ladies knew already we didn’t get to opt out of that one, but thank you Time magazine for pointing it out once again so hysterically.

Meanwhile, KJ Dell’Antonia riffed off this piece at the NYT Motherload blog (tagline: “adventures in parenting,” as if we needed reminding that care for children is understood to be women’s work) by asking the question “can parents stay friends with the childfree?” She excerpts liberally from the Time piece, starting with:

Any national discussion about the struggle to reconcile womanhood with modernity tends to begin and end with one subject: parenting. Even Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” a book focused on encouraging women’s professional development, devotes a large chunk of its take-home advice to balancing work and family, presuming that, like its author, ambitious women will have both.

Dell’Antonia herself then reflects:

As a parent myself, I don’t read my tendency to gravitate toward fellow mothers as judgment — I read it as practical. Fellow parents are more likely to understand if I bail on dinner because of a sudden teacher conference, and their eyes are less likely to glaze over if my preoccupation at that dinner is more temper tantrums than, say, the right way to temper chocolate (which might once have held my interest for hours). In fact, I’d argue that it’s win-win.

So I have some thoughts. Obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this post.

Y’all know, if you’ve spent any time on this blog, that I come at this issue from the perspective of someone deeply invested in remaking the world into a place where families and family care-work is genuinely respected and incorporated into daily life, where children and their carers aren’t ghettoized or put on a (false) pedestal while actually being treated like shit. This (probably radical, feminist, maybe a bit queer) political agenda informs how I think about most public discussions about parenting, not-parenting, work and family life, and how the current organization of our economy and social life constrains the choices we have in these areas.

I also come at this conversation from the perspective of someone who is currently, and will likely remain, partnered but non-parenting. I’ve written elsewhere about the factors going into that decision, which like any major decision is born of inner desires, practical realities, and the needs and desires of those the decision-maker is in close relationship with.

Here are my thoughts.

First, Dell’Antonia directs her question only to mothers:

Do we, as women who are also mothers, judge women who are not? And if we do, do we do it overtly or subconsciously — or just by excluding and including people in our lives based on proximity and similarity without realizing that the path of least resistance is one that, for a parent like me, includes mainly friends who are piloting similar family boats?

What strikes me about this framing of the question is the notion that parents and non-parents are two different species, two different tribes, without “proximity and similarity,” that only fellow parents are “piloting similar family boats.” I notice this a lot in writing about work-life and work-family issues, in discussions about women’s decision-making around work, relationships, reproduction.

I reject this false dichotomy between parents and not-parents. Yes, obviously, parenting changes you — just like any major life experience changes you. But I reject the notion that there’s something about parenting that makes it impossible to communicate with individuals who have not yet (or never plan to) cross that divide. I see a similar dichotomy set up between single and married women (and yes, it’s most often women). It has a kernel of truth, but gets set up as a means to divide people and pit them against one another. To constantly re-inscribe the supposed differences between not-parents and parents suggests that we must be in competition, that our needs and desires must be set against one another, in opposition. When in reality, our needs as humans are more similar than they are different.

Which brings me to my next point: not-parents have families too. Notice how, in the Time piece, “parenting” in the first sentence turns into “family” in the second — with the suggestion that somehow only parents struggle with the competing responsibilities of work and home life? Hanna and I, and our cats, are a family unit. We belong to a wider family circle of parents and parents-in-law, sisters and brothers and siblings-in-law, grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, and extended relationship.

We also, like parents, have this thing called “home” and a life therein, where shit happens. Shit like laundry and cooking (or not-cooking because you haven’t had the energy to go grocery shopping). Shit like getting sick, or caring for a sick spouse, or negotiating with the vet to find an appointment time that you can make before or after work, or on the weekends. Parenting people are not the only ones who’ve had to cancel a dinner date at the last minute — or would understand the necessity of doing so, to take Ms. Dell’Antonia’s example from above. If parents truly are cutting off their not-parent friends because they pre-emptively imagine there’s no longer anything to talk about well … that seems a damned shame to me. I really like my parenting friends, and I gotta say we find plenty to talk about and enjoy together.

Which brings me to my final point, which is when the fuck did friendship become a matter of sameness? Again, I get that it helps to have common interests and experiences, common values and goals. But I also feel like there’s something — a big something — to be said for curiosity, empathetic listening, and learning. I’d never heard of Doctor Who before I met Hanna, and tonight while I’m writing this blog post we’re re-watching “Rose” and talking about how awesome it is as a series re-boot. We didn’t meet as fellow fans, but I was open to discovering something new.

The same could be said about parenting and not-parenting people learning how to talk about their lives (and ask questions about their friends’ lives) in ways that don’t automatically assume that there will be no common ground, or that just because you haven’t had experience Zed you can’t be interested or contribute to a discussion on the topic.

It’s a pretty fucked-up version of identity politics to assume the only meaningful relationships you can have are with those who’ve had your specific set of life experiences.

It’s hot here, as it is pretty much everywhere in the States right now, and I had an iced latte this afternoon to see me through my evening shift … so sleep isn’t coming. Solution: blogging.

I Tumblr-ed & Tweeted the link to this story earlier in the evening, but laying awake in the dark I was doing the math so here’s an expanded/comparison version.

The sample monthly budget above is courtesy of McDonald’s corporation, composed by mad ferrets working for snails in their corporate offices as a teaching aide for their minimum-wage earning employees. See employees! Living in poverty is easy! All ya gotta do is plan.As the author of the post linked above, Robyn Pennacchia, points out this budget exists in a fantasy where things like food, gas, and heat don’t cost anything — or perhaps, can be squeezed out of that $27/day “spending money goal” at the bottom of the table? She writes:

You may think that most of these minimum wage earners are teenagers. Well, 87.9% of minimum wage earners are over the age of 20. 28% of those people are parents trying to raise a kid on this budget. That is not a good thing for our future and it is not a good thing for our economy. In order for the economy to thrive, people have to be able to buy things. All the money going to people at the top does not help us.

I don’t want to live in any kind of dog-eat-dog Ayn Rand erotic fantasy. Human beings are worth more than that. Anyone who works 40 hours a week (nevermind 74 hours) ought be able to take care of all the basic necessities in life. Corporations shouldn’t be able to pay their workers nothing, keep all of the profits to themselves, and expect taxpayers to make up the difference with social programs. It’s not fair to the workers, and it’s not fair to any of us.

Pennacchia has the (shockingly not-shocking) national stats; I thought I’d throw a little cold-water reality on the ferrets’ fantasy budget by comparing it to what Hanna and I actually have to spend on the necessities listed above. Line by line. (I said I’d had too much coffee!)

Savings …… $500.00

The number above is wholly comprised of 401(k) with-holdings and the money we set aside to pay Hanna’s self-employment tax in April. Some of that we get to keep, thanks to deductions, but it’s not exactly secure savings. We’d put some by in our slush fund earlier this year, but that went to the cats’ vet bills in June.

I’m not saying all this in a poor-us fashion, I’m pointing out: $100.00/month in “savings” for someone making minimum wage probably isn’t going into a retirement plan. It’s likely in the sock drawer until they need to drive across the state to the only Planned Parenthood offering affordable healthcare services.

Mortgage/Rent …… $1295.00

We pay for a 1-bedroom in a cheapish part of Boston. I get that Boston is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, but when I first moved here I was working a retail job at Barnes & Noble that paid $9.00/hour. That’s only $0.75 more than the minimum wage. The idea of anyone making that level of income being able to afford a rent, let alone buy a house, is pretty laughable from where I and my compatriots are sitting. If you’re putting aside $100.00/month you’re not accruing anywhere near enough for a downpayment.

Car Payment Transportation …… $175.00

I got this number by adding together our monthly T pass expenditure (about $30/each), our monthly Zipcar membership ($75) and my Hubway membership ($7/month), with a bit of cushion for additional Zipcar fees when we need the car for more trip than usual (like to the vet).

If we lived in the more affordable real estate zones around Boston (i.e. a place where someone might be able to rent a studio apartment for $600.00/month. Maybe. Then we’d be adding in commuter rail fees or car maintenance, insurance, parking, gas. We’ve done the math, and it pretty quickly starts to cancel out any savings otherwise realized.

Car/Home Insurance Student Loans …… $430.00

So we don’t have to pay insurance for a car (which we don’t have) or a home (which we don’t own), but we do have to pay a percentage on our brains. While we have relatively affordable student loan payments through the federal Income-Based Repayment plan, that’s still a not-inconsiderable chunk of our income every month. Which might otherwise go toward that retirement TDA or eventual home ownership. Just sayin’.

Health Insurance …… $225.00

Hanna and I are both generously insured through our workplaces, with plan that are not only paid for pre-tax (the equivalent of a 20% reduction in premiums) but subsidized by our employers. Harvard University even reimburses us Hanna’s copayments after she reaches $135/year (no small perk when you’re talking about regular physical therapy or mental health treatments at $15/visit).

I was on my parents COBRA insurance for a couple of years out of college, and independent Blue Cross/Blue Shield catastrophic-emergency-only insurance a couple of years after that, before moving to Massachusetts and being poor enough to qualify for their state-subsidized insurance plans (thank you Ted Kennedy!). I know how even $225.00/month for a family of two is a deal.

Heating Gas …… $30.00

Our heat is electric (see below), and our water comes included with the rent — but we have a gas stove and pay monthly for that, to the tune of $20-30/month. More in the winter when we’re baking, less in the summer when we’re too sleep deprived to cook in our non-air-conditioned apartment (which of course means we spend more on prepared meals…).

Cable/Phone/Internet …… $70.00

We get the have-a-television cable package for about $18/month, internet for $32, and a land-line for $28. I also maintain my old AT&T cell phone on a pay-as-you-go plan that costs us about $100/year in top-up fees.

I don’t think we need to go over, once again, why services like the internet and phones are basic necessities for even those who are homeless and poverty-stricken; without connectivity it is impossible to conduct business in the world, be taken seriously by potential employers, or — hell — just enjoy your downtime with crap movies.

Electric …… $62.00

We actually do pretty well with our electricity, no that we pay a flat monthly fee that averages out the winter highs (over $200.00) and the summer lows that come from inefficient electric heat. We pay slightly more for wind power, though the differential is pennies at our level. I wish we had the option for solar, since our apartment building gets direct afternoon sun that could really dial the meter back if taken advantage of.

Other …. ???

“Other”? By which you mean … food ($800.00)? Or work-appropriate clothing (~$600.00 annually)? Professional development ($500 so far this year)? Union dues ($380 annually; and no complaints from this quarter)?

The compost collective we pay into for $20/month?

Oh, I suppose you could mean Netflix at $7.99/month…

…and yeah, you probably look askance, McDonald’s, at the $4.00 latte I bought this afternoon which is fueling this late-night verbiage.

Monthly Expenses Total …… $2,562.00

Or 2.03 times what that McDonald’s employee working 74 freakin’ hours per week is supposed to be living on.

You’ll notice I haven’t included anything as luxurious in here as weekend trip to Maine to visit the in-laws (about $300.00 for a car rental plus gas) or fun activities like a movie or the purchase of a used book.

On the one hand, I’m grateful that both of us have found work with employers who value and foster our skills, who encourage our professional growth, who offer generous benefits, and who compensate us within the range of professional respectability. Our household income of about $3,625/month net last year* is a solid cushion above the minimum $2,525/month supposedly required by a household of two adults to get by in our county.

On the other hand, I’m appalled that — as a nation — we continue to ignore the reality that is the increased cost of living well or even just securely. And that we continue to individualize a social problem — pretending that just teaching people struggling to get by on what is patently not enough to craft and stick to a budget is somehow going to solve the problem of poverty.

The only thing that will solve poverty is better-paying employment and a strong social safety net.

And now I’m going to return to staring at the ceiling and listening to the cat hunt mosquitoes in the dark.

*I took our Adjusted Gross Income from our joint state tax form, reduced it by 20% to account for tax with-holdings, and divided by twelve. Our AGI was $54,369.00 in 2012.

Hanna and I woke up this morning to the news that George Zimmerman has been found “not guilty” of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

I haven’t followed the trial closely — only what we heard on NPR, and the coverage by bloggers I follow regularly — so this is not a post about what happened and why. Others much more eloquent will do a better job articulating that (see the bottom of this post for updates as I read and link to them).

What I want to say is this:

On June 26th, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling about same-sex marriage that affirmed my dignity as a woman who has married another woman. I didn’t need the approval of the Supreme Court to recognize that my marriage is valid. At the same time, there was something profound and powerful about an official state body affirming that my citizenship rights should not be abridged.

The day before, the same institution decided the Voting Rights Act was no longer relevant — because apparently the poor, powerless, and marginalized don’t need additional protections from the powerful and power-hungry to ensure their basic rights and well-being.

And the power-hungry immediately rose to the challenge and began abridging the right to vote.

In the weeks that have followed, we’ve watched the Texas legislature ram through legal restrictions on women’s access to basic health and reproductive services. Women in that fine state (Molly Ivins would be proud), including elected officials, worked hard to stop the further curtailment of women’s agency and meaningful ability to determine their own reproductive lives.

The legislation was passed.

Simultaneously, Mr. Zimmerman was on trial for the murder of a young black teenager, Trayvon Martin, whose sole crime was walking while black. I don’t know on what grounds the jury acquitted Zimmerman — although I’m sure I’ll find out in the days to come. I wasn’t gunning for Zimmerman’s blood — I don’t think further violence, state-sanctioned or not, is ever the answer. But when I heard on the radio this morning that the jury had found Zimmerman Not Guilty of murder or manslaughter, my first thought was this: that the verdict represents the opposite of Windsor. It’s the erasure of the personhood of Trayvon Martin by the powers that be and by our collective racism.

For if Zimmerman is Not Guilty of having killed Trayvon Martin, who is?

Are we saying murder didn’t take place?

Are we saying it was a justified killing?

Are we saying, regardless, that we simply don’t care?

I won’t speak for anyone who knew Trayvon Martin personally, but for myself I can imagine that more than any punishment George Zimmerman may have faced upon a guilty verdict, hearing the jury speak his guilt for Trayvon’s murder in so many words — affirming Trayvon Martin’s right not to be dead and the violation of that right which took place when George Zimmerman shot him — would have been a powerful step towards truth and reconciliation. It would have been a group of fellow citizens, speaking with the authority of the state, standing up and saying this is wrong.That didn’t happen.

All of these events are profound and immediate reminders of the effect that state power can have, for good or ill, in supporting, affirming, protecting … or erasing, negating, denying, the personhood of some people (queers, people with uteruses, non-whites, youth, the poor) in the interest of preserving the rights of the powerful not to ever feel afraid or threatened by those whom they don’t understand or dislike.

If the Windsor and Perry decisions reminded me of the positive power of state and majority power, Texas and Florida have done their damnedest these past two weeks to remind me of its dangerous perils.

Though much of the mainstream media who have covered this case have convinced themselves that race did not play a role in this trial, a Black kid is dead because being young, Black, and male, and wearing a hoodie in the rain is apparently a crime punishable by death.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being.

In trying to assess the the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicted truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted of second degree murder or manslaughter. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice.

*note: I apologize for originally mis-spelling Trayvon’s name with an “e”. Not enough coffee. Corrected.